Thenceforth the most noted statesmen and
scholars professed the Stoic philosophy--among others Stilo and
Quintus Scaevola, the founders of scientific philology and of
scientific jurisprudence. The scholastic formality of system,
which thenceforth prevails at least externally in these
professional sciences and is especially associated with a fanciful,
charade-like, insipid method of etymologizing, descends from the
Stoa. But infinitely more important was the new state-philosophy
and state-religion, which emanated from the blending of the Stoic
philosophy and the Roman religion.

The speculative element, from
the first impressed with but little energy on the system of Zeno,
and still further weakened when that system found admission to
Rome--after the Greek schoolmasters had already for a century been
busied in driving this philosophy into boys' heads and thereby
driving the spirit out of it--fell completely into the shade in
Rome, where nobody speculated but the money-changers; little more
was said as to the ideal development of the God ruling in the soul
of man, or of the divine world-law.